BY JENNIFER RUTH

When Jan Haaken and I decided to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know how events here—much less in Gaza and the West Bank—would unfold. We had been talking about a film about the suppression of academic freedom in Texas and pivoted when some of the same right-wing politicians demonizing critical race theory pivoted themselves to demonizing speech and scholarship about Palestine.

A motivating factor for me personally was that I no longer wished to procrastinate on developing a deeper understanding of that phrase—the Palestine exception. I had researched a number of academic-freedom questions (contingency’s impact on the professoriate, authoritarian regimes’ suppression of academic freedom, etc.) but not that one. Wanting to do some real research on this is also why I agreed to serve, when asked to by my university president, on a task force called “Building Bridges” (one of the many, many task forces at colleges and universities that sprung up across the United States in 2023 and early 2024).

When it became clear that the task force would not be able to provide an umbrella for scholarly analyses of the situation, ones sensitive to history and context, I resigned. “The Task Force space felt increasingly untenable for me, given my commitment to academic freedom,” I wrote last spring to members of the committee after resigning, continuing:

Any expertise I might have in this area seemed secondary to the goals of the Task Force, which seem to be about creating dialogue about something extraordinarily complicated and in an asymmetrical situation in which Palestinian-Americans are not well represented. We do not have enough representation from Palestinian-Americans on the task force because, in part, some of the people who were asked rightly felt that a premise that centered questions of discrimination was more likely to be counterproductive than helpful. I can understand that. If you have suffered from the Nakba and statelessness, your issue is not with Judaism. It is not an islamophobia/antisemitism issue. It is an issue rooted in claims over land and who gets to assert those claims and with whose help/support/resources.

Finally, I was not comfortable with attempts to abstract what is happening on campus from what is happening in the country at large. There is a right-wing movement in this country, associated with Trump (Foxx, Stefanik, etc.), that is capitalizing on the conflict in ways that are dangerous and creating narratives that, to my mind, misrepresent and caricature students speaking up for Palestinians. I worry that if we give too much credence to their self-interested narrative at the expense of listening to the stated motives of the protesters (ending a genocide, usually), we’re headed in a dangerous direction come November.

The making of the film became the medium through which to pursue deeper understanding. And, indeed, Jan and I are so grateful that a number of experts stepped up to teach us by allowing us to interview them: people like Saree Makdisi, Ellen Schrecker, Judith Butler, Premilla Nadasen, Jennifer Gaboury and our own colleagues at Portland State (a few of whom descend from fathers expelled during the Nakba and another of whom carries on the tradition of her grandfather, a rabbi well-known for his criticism of Zionism).

And, of course, we also learned from the students who taught us, first and foremost, that it is possible to fight the figurative (and literal) erasure of Palestinians while fighting antisemitism at the same time.

We have screenings throughout the country. Three upcoming screenings in the New York area are open to the public: The People’s Forum (320 W. 37th St.) on February 22nd at 3 pm, Stone Circle Theatre in Queens on February 23 at 7 pm, and Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights at the Rutgers Law School in Newark on Monday, February 24 at 4 pm.

If you’re on a campus or part of an organization that would like to host a screening, please reach out here.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?